Agnès Thurnauer paints words. Painstakingly tracing out letters with a brush is not really writing: the word becomes an object with tangible depth that can be bisected. It can be repeated, like children do, until it sloughs its skin of meaning to become an eerie utterance. This is where poetry begins, cutting words up to bring out new meanings. It is a contemplative process that meshes with the slow process of working on a painting. Agnès Thurnauer’s focus is tighter still, cutting up letters, or rather their negatives, to single out abstract forms like an unfamiliar, silent alphabet. Silence is the intimate obverse of this poetry. She cuts out vaguely anthropomorphic oblongs to lay out in the foreground of her canvas, mute creatures studying a painting together, showing the way for visitors to sink into the mise en abyme. What Agnès Thurnauer showcases above all are the artist’s interventions on the canvas. Even the cloud-laden skies hark back to the Old Masters in their brushstrokes, colour and style. In combining them with the word “now”, she reminds us that art is an immediate experience, not just a history. History could have been written differently, with a female voice, for instance. But tangible reality can only be felt in the present. A far cry from love from afar.

Agnès Thurnauer (b. 1962) is a Franco-Swiss artist who lives and works in Paris.